The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Literature: Modern, by G. H. Mair

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Title: English Literature: Modern
Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge

Author: G. H. Mair

Release Date: February 27, 2004 [EBook #11327]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE

ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN

BY G. H. MAIR, M.A. SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF CHRIST CHURCH

First Printed, October, 1911 Revised & Printed February, 1914

PREFACE

The intention of this book is to lay stress on ideas and tendencies that
have to be understood and appreciated, rather than on facts that have to
be learned by heart. Many authors are not mentioned and others receive
scanty treatment, because of the necessities of this method of approach.
The book aims at dealing with the matter of authors more than with their
lives; consequently it contains few dates. All that the reader need
require to help him have been included in a short chronological table at
the end.

To have attempted a severely ordered and analytic treatment of the
subject would have been, for the author at least, impossible within the
limits imposed, and, in any case, would have been foreign to the purpose
indicated by the editors of the Home University Library. The book
pretends no more than to be a general introduction to a very great
subject, and it will have fulfilled all that is intended for it if it
stimulates those who read it to set about reading for themselves the
books of which it treats.

Its debts are many, its chief creditors two teachers, Professor
Grierson at Aberdeen University and Sir Walter Raleigh at Oxford, to the
stimulation of whose books and teaching my pleasure in English
literature and any understanding I have of it are due. To them and to
the other writers (chief of them Professor Herford) whose ideas I have
wittingly or unwittingly incorporated in it, as well as to the kindness
and patience of Professor Gilbert Murray, I wish here to express my
indebtedness.

G.H.M.
MANCHESTER,
_August_, 1911.